Copernicus, among many others, was a crucial part of that alchemical “transmutation of consciousness” that occurred during the Early Enlightenment, arguing, as we all know, that the Sun and other planets and stars did not revolve around the Earth. At the very beginning of his treatise, he even paid a little tribute to the Hermetica, a point not lost on other late Renaissance/Early Enlightenment figures such as Giordano Bruno.
As science and technology have expanded, scientists have gradually come to see that the Universe(or at least what we can see of it), is oddly “clumped,” with clusters of galaxies, rather than the random distribution of galaxies one might expect along conventional views of Big Bang theory. It’s as if the data was suggesting that the Big Bang was some kind of “shaped charge.” But wait, there’s more, for now that “galactic clumping” seems to be revealing even deeper cosmic structure, one that has suggested to some scientists that Earth is, indeed, at some sort of “cosmic center”, which, because of its deeply “theory shattering” nature, astrophysicists are dubbing “the axis of evil”, since it so radically challenges and overturns some of the cardinal assumptions of astrophysics thus far:Planck Satellite Confirms WMAP Findings: Universe is not Copernican
Now there’s a lot to absorb here, so let’s break it down: 1) there is a kind of “cosmological” or better, “cosmic axis” structure; and (2) this structure is aligned to the plane of the ecliptic of the Earth-Sun solar system and (3) this structure is revealed by the distribution of “hot” and “cold” zones of the background radiation, which zones appear to be correlated to the Earth-Sun solar system ecliptic:

“Without getting overly technical, the Copernican and cosmological principles require that any variation in the radiation from the CMB be more or less randomly distributed throughout the universe, especially on large scales. Results from the WMAP satellite (early 2000s) indicated that when looking at large scales of the universe, the noise could be partitioned into “hot” and “cold” sections, and this partitioning is aligned with our ecliptic plane and equinoxes. This partitioning and alignment resulted in an axis through the universe, which scientists dubbed “the axis of evil”, because of the damage it does to their theories. This axis passes right through our tiny portion of the universe. Laurence Krauss commented in 2005:

“ But when you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.”

Now, while this may or may not be good news for physicists inclined toward some version of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, it does pose a significant problem, and already – as the article itself avers – some physicists see the need for “a new physics,” while the article itself concludes with its own tongue-in-cheek barb against current cosmological physics:

“The question is ‘what will modern science do now’? Will they invent additional parameters to keep the current theories alive (in addition to those already added: dark matter, dark energy, redshift as expansion, big bang inflation, etc.) or will they consider the possibility that we are in a special place as observations clearly indicate?”